Domestic and International 'Nutter Runs Amok' Thread

Well they need guns in case the King of England tries to shoot up a school.

But remember carrying guns and shooting at people who you view as a threat is a right, but being given life saving care after being shot by a gun is a privilege.

Wow, what the fuck

I wonder if they're gonna go out in a blaze of glory? www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59530279

They'll just be the latest cause celebre for the far right.

The Trump generation begins to come of age. This one was about 8 when presumably the TV in his home just started spewing hate day in day out, as did his parents, and a few short years later he's a soldier of Gaaaaahhhd or whatever right wing cuntery his parents wallow in. Will not be the last.

Arrested now without incident, idiots.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects and apologists are keen to make it clear that important thing to remember here is that this is just another few bad apples with obvious mental health problems and that the gun is completely innocent. We definitely should not consider how one got into the hands of a minor who shouldn't have had it. That would be ridiculous and unconstitutional.

Nothing is ever going to change in America.

Because I used to be a legal researcher (up until 4 years ago) and whilst civil cases rather than criminal ones were what I was mainly looking at, I also read a lot of criminal cases, and spoke to lawyers about this issue (which came up in the press a bit too).

It's largely been corrected now thanks to changes in the law/CPS guidance (I am told, I haven't been following closely lately), but for a long time, the CPS pretty severely misused the offence of conspiracy, both in applying it to situations where it was illegitimate (but sometimes getting away with it, at least until years or even decades of appeals), often when poor or black people were involved, and failing to apply it when it was legitimate - particularly when white people were involved.

I can't find the exact cases now (some legal researcher eh? I guess I am nothing without LexisNexis/Library and so on! Also the rise of conspiracy theories as news has made it near-impossible to search for in non-legal sources), but the abuse typically looked like this:

A couple of kids decided they were going to stab someone, possibly in the course of minutes. They didn't tell anyone else. Some other kids who knew them, and/or were in a formal or informal gang with them, who weren't at the scene, didn't know about the offence, and where there was zero evidence to support them being involved in any way whatsoever, were charged with conspiracy for the attack/murder. This pretty much only ever happened when everyone involved was non-white. Sometimes the links were incredibly tenuous.

If you actually look at the law on conspiracy, and the way it's meant to be used, you'd think this was a non-starter, but the CPS' barristers actually managed to succeed in convincing judges and juries that it was correct quite a few times, especially in the 2000-2014 period. Even beyond actually succeeding with it, conspiracy was routinely charged, seemingly in an attempt to "leverage" people into giving evidence or confessing to lesser crimes - that might seem legitimate if you watch a lot of US TV, but it's completely against the rules here (we also cannot outright lie to people being questioned, whereas in the US it's routine in most jurisdictions).

I've been on a jury a few times, and in one of those cases, whilst conspiracy itself wasn't charged, the CPS' barristers were trying to make a palpably ludicrous claim that there was a "conspiracy" (even using the term) between three twenty-year-olds and a fourteen-year-old who was following them around at a distance in order to attempt to argue that the twenty-year-olds should be charged for something the fourteen year-old did. This did not work out for the CPS, but I can see how with a different jury makeup it might have, which would, frankly, have been a miscarriage of justice.

We had a radicalized guy earlier this year in Sweden dress up in Nazi gear and head off to his school to live stream his killing spree.

Luckily he couldn't get a gun since white middle class kids in Sweden can't get guns that easily, so it ended with him stabbing a teacher (seriously wounded but survived) then realizing that killing people isn't all that simple of you have to stab them, and that was the end of that.

So glad that fucknut didn't have a gun. Then he could have pretended it was just a video game.

All you have to do to prove that is look at any other country in the world. There is only one country where this is at all an ongoing issue

Basically, yeah. Other countries do have school shootings, but they're rare and usually small-scale, like one or two casualties, usually one of them the shooter (the Dunblane Massacre which was kind of different is the worst I'm aware of outside the US). Australia started to have a problem, but after it put in much stricter gun laws they seem to have stopped. Brazil also has a problem, but it's small compared to the US and also Brazil has lax gun laws a bit like the US so...

It's not just gun laws though - I mean they're a lot of it - it's also US attitudes to bullying and mental health, combined with access to mental health care. Bullies are coddled in US schools, and bullying is seen as much more acceptable (certainly compared to the UK, which isn't exactly great with bullying), even glorified to some extent (yes even now). Mental health stuff has improved, but in a lot of places you still have parents who think mental health problems are pure weakness and at best should be treated with prayer/discipline, and even if the parents do believe in mental health, it's expensive to access - too expensive for a lot of poorer people. It all seems a bit cliched but then things that keep happening for the same reasons always do.

It's a combination of a ton of different things for sure. Even something as relatively unconnected as funding comes into it, the education system as a whole is so woefully underfunded it's hard for them to deal with societal issues beyond cursory "someone think of the children!" PR campaigns. And any money that comes in goes on stupid fear shit like security and metal detectors.

Gun laws need to be changed 100% but guns are as much a cultural thing as it is a legal thing - that being said, if the full force of the law is thrown at these parents for being indisputably top level morons for neglecting their own responsibilities, it is at least some kind of a actionable message beyond thoughts and prayers. But they're also well off white Christians and we've all seen how they're treated in court...

Merry Christmas from republican representative Thomas Massie.

Do these people fuck their guns or something?